Suffering – The Right Question to Ask When Suffering Appears

When Buddha talks about suffering, he talks about the impermanence of everything in existence, desire, and so on. That teaching tends to reach people who’ve already gone through some shift in their lives and started a spiritual journey. What about those who simply want to live well? They aren’t chasing enlightenment. They just want a life that feels a little lighter.

When I talk about suffering here, I mean something more ordinary: how we feel inside when we’re uncomfortable or restless emotionally. We don’t always understand what’s happening to us, but we can feel that it hurts. Sometimes things happen to us. And sometimes, without realising it, we create the suffering ourselves.

A Friend Who Kept Postponing

A friend of mine kept making plans to meet me and, at the last moment, postponing. This went on for almost a month. At first I took it personally. Then I noticed something. He does this with everyone, his friends, his family, even his kids. He is genuinely a kind person. He wasn’t doing it to hurt anyone. But somewhere underneath it, I could see what was happening. He was afraid. Afraid that if he didn’t meet everyone, if he didn’t keep everyone around him happy, he would lose them.

So he kept saying yes to everyone. And then, when he couldn’t actually be everywhere, he postponed. Not because he didn’t care. Because he cared too much, in a way that had turned into fear.

He wasn’t even aware he was doing it. To him, it probably just felt like being a good friend, a good father, a good son. But the pattern was creating exactly what he feared. The postponing, the last-minute cancellations, over time, that is what actually makes people feel unheld. The very thing he was trying to protect, he was quietly wearing down.

This is what I mean when I say we sometimes create our own suffering. Not through big mistakes, but through small, repeated patterns we don’t even see, because they come from something as ordinary as wanting to be loved.

Looking Inside Instead of Outside

We’re very good at looking for reasons outside ourselves. We blame circumstances, other people, bad luck, our past, our personality, our environment. Sometimes those things genuinely matter, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But sometimes, if we look honestly, we may find that our own choices are part of what keeps the pain going.

This isn’t about being bad, or about everything being our fault. It’s just that actions have consequences, and if we don’t see the connection, we keep repeating the action and then keep experiencing the consequence. It takes courage to remove the fog of outside circumstances and look for answers inside. But I prefer to look, and to look closely.

Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable. We may find that we’re not only suffering from what’s happening to us. We’re also suffering from what we keep doing.

Where These Questions Meet

This isn’t the first time this site has come to this question from a different direction. Fear asks what we’re doing because we’re afraid. The Purpose of Life asks what we’re doing that keeps creating the same result. Suffering seems to be where those roads meet, because it’s usually the first thing we notice, long before we’ve worked out whether fear, an old belief, or a pattern nobody ever pointed out is sitting underneath it.

So the next time something keeps repeating in a way that quietly hurts you or someone else, there’s a question worth sitting with: what part of this is actually mine? Not to find blame. Just to see.

And once that’s clear, the next question is no longer “why am I suffering?” It becomes: what am I willing to do differently, to stop creating this?

Let the Answer Come in Its Own Time

That question doesn’t need an answer right away. You don’t have to fix anything the moment you ask it. Just sit with it, without judgement, and without rushing to label what you feel or what you find. Let the answer come in its own time.

Sometimes it will. Sometimes it won’t, not yet. Either way, you will have looked. Not the answer, just the looking. And that alone is already a kind of peace.

There’s another way to look at suffering too: how we relate to our emotions. Most of the time, we resist them, and that resistance becomes its own quieter layer of suffering, one that shows up in our behaviour before we ever notice it. Learning to Sit with the Present goes into that more closely.